I turned on Google Search History because I figured it might be useful to have this data available at some point in the future. However the implementation of the feature has be about ready to turn it off.
I was rather accustomed to doing a search for something, right clicking on the result I wanted and copying the URL (to use in a blog post, etc.). With Search History enabled, all of the URLs in the search results are google.com redirect URLs. This means I have to click through, wait for the site to load, put focus in the location bar and copy to get what I used to get from my right click in the results list.
It doesn’t have to be this way either, a simple JS action on the real URLs (doesn’t Google Analytics already do this) would give Google the same ability to capture the “click” data without having to modify the URLs. Heck, they might do this already on normal search result pages.
I obviously haven’t looked into this in depth, this is just my experience so far. Feel free to make corrections and suggestions in the comments.
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Andreas Gohr adds this Comment:
IIRC they do the redirects for “normal” searches as well, but not always but only for a small sample of users. I think there was an FAQ on this somewhere at Google. I use the “Customize Google” Firefox extension which has an option to “Disable Link Tracking” among a ton of other useful changes to the various Google services.
March 7th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
adam adds this Comment:
AFAIK, it’s not so they can track clicks, it’s so that they can pass search terms and source information along to the website you’re visiting.
March 7th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Kerim Friedman adds this Comment:
There is a Greasemonkey script to fix this.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
adam - why would they only do it when you have Search History turned on then?
March 7th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Adam Jacob Muller adds this Comment:
I do not get this effect, I have, and have always had click tracking turned on with google. Links for me point directly to the web site in question.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I’m very curious how Google determines when to enable this “feature” and when not to.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:15 am